Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 900: Least Healthy Health Ad

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Costco defied Trump's DEI directive as Target and Walmart scaled back. Business is booming Republicans, Braced for Losses, Push More Voting Restrictions in Congress - The New York Times Trump's election bill tops 50 Senate votes, but Democrats could still block it Trump's Director of Election Security Is an Election Denier - The New York Times FCC Attempt to Kill Stephen Colbert Interview Completely Backfires What the 'Epstein Files' tell us about conspiracy theories – and about skeptics Watch Kid Rock and RFK Jr. take off their shirts in new workout video

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Trust and real. Get 20% off when you visit trust and will.com slash future. That's trust and will.com slash future to get 20% off. Trust and will.com slash F-U-T-U-R-E. This episode of Cognitive Dissinance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glorahole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is cognitive dissonance.

Every episode would we blast anyone who gets in our way? We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence. To any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no... Welcome at. Today is Thursday, February to 19th. And Cecil, there are aliens, the president, the ex-president, Barack Obama said. Barack Hussein Obama. Burst certificate unknown has said out loud, yes, there are aliens. They're among us. I know their names. Their name is Jim and Greg. And we are friends. And we play hoops.

Even though that's what he said. I have seen his long farm birth certificate, there is no proof that he is not an alien. He is an alien. Look, it has been contended, obviously, that he was an illegal alien. If you're a racist shithead like Trump, you actually were contending that he was an alien. I think people like Trump were just asking questions. There are aliens. I think that's amazing. Like, he had a conversation with a guy.

I forget the guy's name. I'll be honest. I don't know anybody's name. I barely know my name. But he had a conversation with a fella who was interviewing him. and then he says, the person that asks, are aliens real? And Trump and Trump. And Obama says something like,

yes, but I've never met him. And, you know, and then he says something else. And then that was the end of it. And then specifically afterwards, everybody's like, see, they said it was real. And then he had to send out a tweet that said, what I mean to say is, statistically, it is almost impossible

for them not to be real. But I don't, they're not here. And they're not hanging out with us. And everyone's like, you've walked it back. The aliens told you to run that. You know, it's not black and white, it's gray. Like the grays that are here on Earth controlling us. He did say gray, he did say, I don't think they're grays or whatever is what he says in the interview or something.

He does say something like that where he's like, I don't think they're gray's. Look, if the question is, do you think they're real? Yeah, I think they're real too. But real isn't the same thing as here. They could even exist in our own solar system just they'd be single cells or something like that. Sure. Right. Like, it would be alien life.

It just happens to be in a real thing. place we ever found it. Right. Right. Like, our aliens here is a different question than do you think that aliens are real? Like, anybody who understands how big numbers work, you should just be like, yeah, probably. But if you understand how big numbers work, you should probably be like, but probably not here. Yeah. And I think, too, it's also like the way the question is framed, aliens could mean a lot of things. Yeah, man. Right? It's not, when, when people say aliens, they immediately think of, well, it's got to be a biped. It's got to be a humanoid.

It's got to talk like beep-bop, beep-boss. And it's got to say shit to me in a way that I understand it. That's not necessarily what an alien could be. I mean, there are people who have dreamed up alien life forms that aren't bipeds. Right. That are really interesting, clever ideas, right? Like the big ideas of the whale, like giant organisms that would live at the top of, like, gas giants and things like, so the people who think of this stuff all the time, what kind

of alien life could there be? We know about what our life looks like right here. We don't know what life looks like anywhere else. We have no idea. So saying alien means too much. It's all tardigrades. Yeah. I said that's the, I do. That would be awesome. If we were all, if we were all tony bears all the way down. Just what it is. We were just a big collection of like a trillion tardigrades. If you like break us apart, there's just, you ever step on like a spider carrying a sack of like spider eggs and they all scatter. I think if you smash a person, it's just tardigrades. Oh, it'd be amazing.

If you get punched too hard, you just shatter into a million tartarades. Oh, God, there's so many people. They'll just shatter into a million tartar grades. Oh, he's so good. Real quick, did you ever read when you were, especially when you were a young person? Because we both grew up during the, like the first big, well, not the first. We grew up during a spike, I should say, in interest in the alien phenomenon, right? So I think there's been multiple spikes and peaks and valleys.

But ours, our age, the 90s. The 90s. And like late 80s, yes. Yeah. So did you read the Whitley Stryber books, Communion and the other books that followed? This is the people who have been abducted. I did not, no. So these books were, they were, they're fiction, right?

Whitley Stryber is a fiction writer. But he wrote the books as if they were not fiction. So if you got it from the library, you went to the fiction section to get it. You did not go into the nonfiction section. But everything on. the book is promotionally designed to make you think that this is

nonfiction. This is a like, I am telling you the story of a thing that happened to me. Jesus Christ, that book scared the ever-loving shit out of me. I read them all. I read everything Whitley Stryber wrote back in the 90s, like as a young person. No other books scared me as much. Because to my very young mind, my like middle school early high school mind, it was a kind of

fear that seemed plausible. So when I would read other, like, you know, scary shit, it didn't seem plausible. Like, I read it, you know, in, like, middle school or, yeah, middle school junior high. And I'm like, yeah, I'm very confident that the sewer is not full of clowns, right? Dean Coons is another example. Dean Coons, never scared me at all. Stephen King, never scared me at all. Like, McCammon, like, all those, I read all those guys.

Clive Barker, loved all that stuff. None of it, none of it scared me at all. Whitley Stryber, scared the shit out of me, dude. I couldn't, like, fall asleep at night. like I was like are they gonna come get me the alien leans out and be like

hey bro you got any more cheese dish god I was so stupid here's the thing here's the thing though Dean Coons I used to laugh at his shit

that was hilarious for some reason Dean Coons his big thing was whenever there was a bad guy he was like super strong he would have to eat a lot of cheeseburgers

to like fuel his strength he had this thing about like cheese burgers like you had a bunch of cheeseburgers anyway one of the things he wrote about was a serum that either devolved or evolved you passed a certain thing.

And there was a section where a bunch of people were plugged into their computers with like their brains like connected directly to and they were like atrophied. And I was like, that's hitting a little too close to home today. I laughed at you when I was a kid. Right.

Why did you do this now? Yeah, I know, man. It's like, don't read that and then watch Wally. and then I just feel like and then live in our country Welcome to Costco

I love you Welcome to Costco I love you Welcome to Costco I love you All right this story comes from Yahoo Finance Costco defied Trump's DEI directive

As Target and Walmart scaled back Business is booming Couldn't love this more Yeah I think we're starting to see more and more of this kind of like, hey, we had this initial phase where everybody was like, we got to do what he says. We got to do what he says. He's going to fucking bury us if we don't do what he says. And then the people that have stood up have actually been reasonably successful. There's

been a lot of success stories. And this Costco one is such a good example because Target is eating shit. Target immediately is eating shit and they've not regained ground. Yeah, I went to a target. I think it was like maybe two weeks ago. I hadn't been to a target and over, it was over a year because they announced their DEI stuff pretty quickly after Trump took office. So it was like, so I went there the other night because I was looking for a very specific thing that only they carry. It was a soda. I wanted to try. It turned out it was terrible. It was literally awful. And I didn't buy it from them. I bought it from somewhere else. I bought it online. And it was like literally the worst tasting soda I never had in my life.

Really? It was like, it was so bad. And it was, and the good thing was is that it was ultimately one of the most expensive San Kansas soda I ever had my life. You gotta tell me what was it. So I saw an article or an ad for Stiller soda. Ben Stiller is making soda now.

And I was, and I thought, why? And I thought, and it said all natural soda. And it said it had low sugar, but it was all natural. And I'm not,

I'm not an amazing fan of like a Coke zero. I like it. I think it's a good alternative to drinking a regular Coke, but it's not something that my brain craves. When I think about it,

I'm like, oh, I don't really want that. I really do like some of these new shelters that I'm having that have this, like, tiny bit of sugar that are in there with the juice. So they're putting real juice in there in the seltzer. And it tastes really good. It's like a good mixture. And I thought to myself, well, if there's a tiny amount of sugar in this thing, maybe it'll taste solid. Maybe it'll be good. I didn't realize that, like, stevia is all natural. So most of the sweetness comes from the stevia, which is awful. And the soda itself is what they call a prebiotic soda, which is something I've never had before. and it's literal trash. It is if you take an entire, like, let's say you have a throw a party

and everybody threw their can, half can of soda in your garbage. Then you took your garbage and you set it outside for a day, Tom. And you let it sit in that black bag and it's sort of fermented a little bit. And then you cut the bottom open and you poured it in there. It would taste better than whatever I drink. It was the worst tasting soda I ever had in my life. I took one taste of it and I was like, I'm going to take this to my guys on Tuesday.

Because I got game with guys on Tuesday. I'm going to take it to my Tuesday night guys. And I left it there and nobody had it. And then the next day I got a message like, that stiller soda was vile. I was like, yeah, man, it's looking terrible. But anyway, so long story short, I went into the target to find this soda.

I couldn't find it there. I had to order it online anyway. But I went inside. And it was dead. It was a Saturday night around like seven or eight, which is normally, I would imagine there would be normally some people in there. It was dead. I saw three people in there.

It was absolutely dead. I think one of the issues that people have with large corporations is they see any kind of, anything that they do that seems to be inclusive or that is showing some sort of reaching out to a marginalized community, they see it as performative. So people will say that's performative when they put a. the LGBT flag. That's performative when they do this stuff. I think that there's a couple things

that you've got to say about that. One is there's nothing that a company does that you can break away from if they are trying to get a profit. There's no way you can't say that's not performative. You have to look at it that way. You and I read a book. One of the first things we ever read together

was the grounding of the metaphysics of morals, right? So you and I read a book years ago that was about how can you do things that are in your self-interest that are both ethical and in your self-interest. Because you can't say that it was ethical if it was in your self-interest.

That was a whole, just the book. You can read it. It's like a pamphlet. It's a tiny book. It's like, I read it in a... You could take a shit and you can read this book. It's really fast.

But in any case, that was Kant's whole message, right? His whole thing. And in that tiny book, there's other things that he has. Obviously, he has a whole library of books that you could read. That's all he did.

That's all he did. He talks about one thing. It was a tiny pamphlet. I actually got a spark note to the pamphlet. And then I got a cliff note to that spark notes. I think it's chat, GPT, I needed to me. But in any case, there's no way to look at it and say it's self, it's not self-interested. It's probably almost always self-interest, unless they're actively losing money, right?

Unless they do something that is actively losing money. So in this case, you can look at them walking away from DEI, going away from this sort of thing, as self-interested. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, they did this in a way that was self-interested because they thought they were going to make money. and look at what happened to them. I think performative, something that is performative,

not necessarily doesn't matter whether it's performative or not to those marginalized communities because I think, you know, like, should it matter if Marvel makes a movie with a female lead performatively or actually?

Right? Does it matter to the person who's, you know, does it matter if it's performative racism or real racism? Yeah, right. Does it, does it mean, it shouldn't, it doesn't matter to those people, right?

the people who are the object of that thing or the people who might see representation and that thing, it doesn't matter to them necessarily. They're just, they get an opportunity to do that. I think that there is nuance to that. Obviously, it can be really obviously performative and that can be bad too. I recognize that. But I think like people fall back on this. You know, it's performative and that's bullshit and we shouldn't pay. I think that we should be paying attention to these companies and encouraging them to do this sort of thing because it is more inclusive. It does make people feel more welcome, and that's a good thing. And when they do something like this, you should punish them.

It's just exactly what happened. Yeah, I totally agree. I've always felt like, well, companies are not people, so they don't actually have values. So the things they do can't reflect their values because they're not people. Yeah. So everything is performative, right? And so, but I agree with you entirely, the performances matter because the performances help to create the culture that we all live in. And so we can choose, do we want to live?

live in a culture where the performance is you are welcome here, or do we want to live in a culture where the performance is you are not welcome here? It's all a performance. This shit that Walmart and Target is doing, this isn't like, this is not a person being like,

oh, you stripped away the mask. It's all the performance. Target and Walmart are stripping away DEI because they thought that was the thing that they needed to do as a business decision to increase their bottom line. So, like, all of it's a performance. but I do think that it adds up to what kind of culture do we want to live in?

I want to live in a culture where the pressure is to create an environment that openly welcomes all types of people. I go to Costco, man, you can't park at a Costco. Nobody's ever parked at a Costco. Everybody who has ever parked has parked six blocks away and taken a fucking shuttle to a ferry and they've gotten on a segue to get to the car. That place is jumping no matter. what. I thought I was going to

the odds going to Costco a few weeks ago. I went on a horrifying like my kids didn't go to school it was so cold. Bitterly cold day. I'm like, less people will be out in the world. It's literal misery outside. I was like, I'm going to go to Costco. In the middle of the day on a

Wednesday. And it was a fucking 40 below. You can't go to Costco. You can't do it. Nobody's ever been to Costco. All you do is drive to the Costco, drive around the parking lot, and then go home and then somehow you have stuff in your car. That's all that's ever happened.

They're busy, dude. They're busy all the time. It doesn't matter what time of day or it is. Sarah and I will go on the weeknights. We'll go on a weeknight around like six or seven at night if we go. And it's, you walk in and it is full of people. It is just full of people. My worst feeling at Costco is when I get to the end and I'm like,

I hate how they have their lines set up because most of the times the lines are like, it's kind of just like they shit out into like one big, area. Here's your big area of lines. And there's no like, I am crazy for order. So I'm always just, I always want to just like straighten people up. I want to walk by and be like, you need to stand, do the thing where you're behind them. What are you doing?

You're making me crazy. I literally hate shopping there. But I do it. But I hate the experience. As soon as I found out, this was last year, as soon as I found out that they were a company that was sticking with their DEI policy, I immediately said to Sarah, let's go get a cost. membership. We bought one last year.

We bought one last year. We had one in the past through her work. Like she used to work at a different place and they had like some deals where certain people get easy membership or whatever. And so we've had one in the past, but we never really used it. Now we're using it more if we can. So we buy produce there now. Right.

But the problem is the produce comes on like a crate. Yeah, you've got to get like a thousand zucchini. It's great for bananas in my opinion. Because I got to buy three pounds of bananas. I'm almost always going to take two and a half pounds and put them in the freezer anyway. So it doesn't matter. You got to fight for your right to vote. All step for man, one giant ever dream.

All right. So the bunch of stories, New York Times, Republicans braced for losses, push more voting restrictions in Congress. Legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote was only the beginning as the GOP presses to sharply limit voting in line with President Trump's false claims of widespread fraud. Yeah, the proof of citizenship thing is diabolical in some ways because of the birth certificate thing. Such a problem. Especially for women who've taken the last name of their husband, which is a cultural thing that we do in our country.

And the real problem is it doesn't match. So now it doesn't match. Well, now what? Now what the fuck do you? Now you're showing up with a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, proof of current ID. These are barriers that when these same barriers, were applied to

restrict the ability of black people to vote in the Jim Crow era, we all got together at some point and said, hey, we should pass some laws that say you can't do this. And we are reverting back with racism as the out and out cause, like reasoning for it,

to the same shit that 60 years ago or so, we were like, hey, you know what, actually, this Jim Crow era shit is horrifying. like we're a minute away from a goddamn poll tax man or a literacy test. Yeah, you're not wrong. That's what a passport is. I mean, if you have to have a passport,

I cost you money. These things aren't free. And it's not a small amount of money either, by the way, to get a passport. I just renewed my passport recently because I'm going to England in the fall. And it's fucking expensive, dude, to get your passport filled up.

I know when I would, before I was, like, before I had enough money to, like, two pennies to strape together, that would not be a thing that made it to the expense list. It wouldn't be something that I would say, especially if I wasn't planning on leaving the country, I'd say, fuck, why would I get that?

Now in order to vote, I got to pay you $160? Dude, like, minimum, right? So, like, just your driver's license is not enough. That's not proof of citizenship. So, yeah, like, you've got to have a passport or you've got to get a birth state. Well, a lot of people don't have their birth certificate. I don't have mine.

You can't just go get a free copy of your birth certificate. That's not a thing. If you were, like, you got to go to the county that you were born in. and then you've got to request a certified copy, which you pay for. You also have to pay to take the day to go down to the county. Oh, but what if you were born like my wife was in Hawaii? Now what? Now what?

She's here in Illinois. If she has to get a copy of her, though, she has her birth statement, but if she didn't, if it was just a document that got lost. Now, how is she supposed to do that? And you know, Haley did take my name. Like, it's not uncommon. It's quite common in many circles to take somebody else's name. So, like, that's a whole thing.

It's a whole fucking thing. When you start disenfranchising people in numbers this large, you are, we've talked about this before. Like, people always make this mistake of saying, well, there's a minority disenfranchisement. It's a minority in terms of minority based on power. It's not a minority in terms of numbers. If you disenfranchise women and people of color and you start adding that up, you are are you have disenfranchised most of the people in this country most and that is very much

hearkening back in my opinion to like the very first early founding days where it's like are you a white property owner if so welcome in the tent that's what we mean by all men were created equal these men over here and only men for sure for sure yeah sarah doesn't have my last name because i said i i in order to take it you have to beat me in combat and she never wanted to take my implant so i was like no you got to beat me. You actually have to beat me. You have to take it into Thunderdome. You keep what you kill, but you got to kill it.

You got to take it. Like, I'm not going to just give it to you. Well, and she had the master blaster on her back, and that helps. I mean, it does. And then she challenged me to trivia and then she beat me. No, but, but I, yeah, I'm right there with you. And I think, too, the thing that people forget is how much of a hassle it is to do all these things that require you to visit places with, with.

when you don't have time to do it. Yeah. I mean, like, I used to work when I lived, when I lived right out of high school, not a high school, out of college. When I graduated from college, my wife and I, we moved out of the area of Chicago

to a suburb. I worked in Chicago at the time and so did she for a little while and then she started driving to work in a different suburb. Two of us are just out of college. We don't have a fucking pot to piss in. I didn't have time during my day.

I literally had to take a bus to a train to take the train downtown, then do that on the back. It was two and a half hours each way. It was unbelievable amount of time of my day. And I had to work all day and then come home. When did I have time to vote, let alone, anything else? Right. When did I have time to do these things? It was really hard for me to even find time to get to a poll.

I did. I made time for it. But it wasn't easy. What happens if I have to not just do a vote, but now I've got to do a vote and I've got to go somewhere to do a thing beforehand. and I've got to have the money to do it. You know, it was just an intense amount of work just to even just vote, let alone, do all those extra things, other hoops I have to go through. It's totally different if you're an executive.

I can take the afternoon off and I can go make an appointment at the DMV and get my real ID from them or whatever. That's a totally different thing than if I'm just some random guy who's got maybe two jobs or maybe I have to commute a million miles away because I can't live near my job because it's so expensive to live nearby. And now my whole day is. spent around me subsisting, right? Me living. And then once

in a while I get to make a, like, voting becomes a choice, like a big choice for you. Like, it's something you've got to put on your calendar to, like, decide if you're going to do. There was times you were telling me, your job literally wouldn't even let you leave, even though it was against the law for them to do that. They would just be like, no. Yeah. It was, they, they

would not expressly say no, but nobody else was doing it. Nobody was going to do. So there was an intense, like, the job I had before the one I had now, I would work like nobody left for like lunch. One of the things I had to do was deposit money in the bank and I would have to make sure. And the bank was literally, I could see it from my office window. And I couldn't, even though depositing the money was still something I had to do for my job, like I was required to bring my cell phone and to forward my landline to my cell phone so that I was

not unavailable during the 15 minutes that it took me to do that. To leave for a couple hours to drive home into my polling place and then vote was a non-starter. There's no way you're going to do that. There's a non-starter. They can't stop you. Right? They can't stop you to do it. But they'll look at you sideways later.

That's the thing is like everybody always says, oh, you can't fire me for that. It's like, dude, they can fire you for any reason that they want and then just not tell you. Yes, exactly. Like, they just won't say why you're fired and they'll do it a month later. Are you telling me, like Jeff Bezos is going to sign off on an Amazon worker taking the office 13 hour day to go fucking vote? Of course not. Of course not.

But in Illinois, we have the ability to vote by mail. And vote by mail has opened up a ton of stuff for a ton of people. They want to repeal this. Like, one of these other stories is the next step of this. Let me make one other quick comment about the county system. So I have a lot of familiarity with county systems. And I'll tell you that in almost every circumstance, every county building you go to, every county clerk that you go to for the records that you would need, they are monumentally understaffed.

Sure. So if all of a sudden... one old lady named Betty. It's terrible. And she watches four phones and works at three different desks. Yeah, man, like Cook County is the second largest county in the country. It's huge. It's a massive county. And there was a time last year, and this is not related to these records, but just to give you an idea of how bad it can be, massively big county. Again, second largest county in the country, second only to Los Angeles. There was literally, there was a property tax document that's boring. there was only one person in the entire county that knew how to get and create this kind of property tax bill. Lots of people needed it.

This lady got sick and she was out on medical leave for over a year. Nobody could get that document for over a year. People couldn't sell homes. They lived in homes, Cecil, that they were trying to sell and they needed this specific type of property tax document. And you'd go to the county to get it and they'd be like, yeah, fuck. and whatever her name is, is out on medical leave, we don't know when she's going to be back. There's nobody else that can do it. These are fragile systems, is my point.

If we create a circumstance where you have now 50, 60, 70, 100, 200 times more people showing up to get copies of birth certificates, it's not like that's going to go well and smoothly, and you're going to have that request process swiftly, and you're going to get that in time to go vote. You're going to show up, and there's going to be a line. and there was never a line before, and there's going to be 500 people at, like, Cook County, and there's still going to be two people processing those requests, and they'll get to them when they get to them.

And maybe you can't even get it, even if you went to the county, in time for you to register. It's going to be a shit show. Yeah, and they're trying to take away, one of these bills is trying to take away voting by mail. Yes. They're trying to take away. They're saying that all votes should be,

they need to be counted on the day of and no other votes afterwards, so that would disenfranchise anybody who lives abroad, any military people that have to send their stuff in that might not get it in on time. They'd have to send it very early in order to get it. These things are, they are trying to do whatever they can to chip away whatever they can away from, and I think it's also really important to point out.

And this is something that I think we need to say time and time again is this is laying ground for pointing out that the elections are fraudulent. Because if they put enough dust in the air and they get enough people thinking about it, then they start saying, well, it's all these illegal immigrants that are voting, and that's what's causing it. And we're trying to stop it. But they've said there's a problem that there isn't.

And now they're trying to fix the problem that doesn't exist so that they can then later on say it was that problem that doesn't exist that caused this issue. And now we're going to, you know, keep a hold of the government or whatever it is that they're going to do. And they've done this with all different kinds of systems that we've seen. And this is just the next thing that they're moving on to. It's massive voter suppression. Exactly. Like add all these steps up. So think in your mind about all the things, and I can't, I probably miss a bunch of them.

I think it's like the Save Act or the Safe Act or whatever. So Trump has talked about federalizing the elections. They've talked about sending immigration troops, armed immigration troops, to basically intimidate people and stand around with fucking guns at our polling places. That's a suppression method. They've closed over the years. many, many polling stations intentionally in a lot of these districts to make getting to polling harder and to create longer lines to do exactly we were talking about to create pressure for people

who can't take time off of work, time is unpaid. Even if you, by the way, like even if you are protected by your employer and you're allowed to take that time off to go vote, they don't have to pay you for it. That's just time, that's money you didn't earn today. So like, you're paying out of your pocket then to go vote. And if they can make that line longer, they can increase the pressure on people to not stand in that line

and not watch the clock tick and realize every hour I stand here, I'm losing money, I need to feed my family. This is all calculated. It's all calculated. They knew that they were going to do this. We knew they were going to do this too because they not only set it in Project 2025,

it's an extension of their entire voting strategy since forever is try to diminish everybody else's vote as much as they can, especially like non-rich people vote. Do whatever you can to diminish that. do whatever you can to diminish minority vote. That's what you want to do as much as possible. And cheat to win. I mean, it's essentially what they want to do.

This is, it's a huge problem. Right now, there's a chance that they can stop it with the filibuster, right? Because they have enough votes. They haven't have votes to pass it with J.D. Vance. I think Murkowski and somebody else might have been necrotic, necrotic face. McConnell. McCone. Dead turtle, man.

Those two people said no. So they don't have enough votes technically. They'd have to tie it. Well, tying it means you'd have to get J.D. Vance to come off vacation for a day and sit in there and vote. But they could do that, but they can't get past the filibuster. If this is it, this is the moment, if you back down on this, you'll never see another real election in our country again with this bill. This bill is genuinely a horror for all of us. And I know there's a lot of people who think, well, you know, you shouldn't, you got to, we got to make sure that illegal immigrants can't vote. And you're like, they can't vote already. That's already a thing that's true. I saw a, you know, this is a similar sort of, it's not the same thing, but it relates. I was on someone's Facebook message page recently. I just like looking at a relative of mine. I looked at their Facebook page and they were talking about how, you know, it's terrible.

what's happening with immigration in this country. I can't believe people are being so awful to all these people who just want to like a better life. It was something like that. It was something simple. And there was so many people who were commenting on there. It might have just been one who was just commenting a bunch. I don't remember exactly.

But it was like the comment was essentially, our country is overrun with immigrant rapists and murderers. Essentially was the thing. Great. And it's because that's the message. And that message gets amplified by the news sources and by the influencers and by all the people who are on that side. to say this very provable untrue thing over and over and over again.

It relates to voting in the same way, right? All these legal immigrants are voting. So if you were to look anywhere, not only would it be sort of astroturfed by the right and by foreign entities that want to make this a big thing, it would also be said and parroted by all the influencers and all the dumb people who think it's a real thing. So it's constantly being said over and over and over again.

We know that when you hear something over and oh, you tend to believe it. This is a perfect example. If you keep saying the election is rigged because they let illegal immigrants vote and they're causing this problem, suddenly all the solutions don't matter to you. You think, oh, that's not a big deal. Right. It is a huge deal and it might take away your chance to vote and your ability to vote and your ability to cast your vote and be a voice, to have an actual voice in our government. you know, we can't, to your point, like we cannot say that we live in and value a democracy

if we are doing anything at all other than encouraging people to vote. Those two ideals are necessarily like mutually exclusive to one another. If you say that the form of democracy, I am a person, I want to vote, why I'm a citizen, I get to vote one person, one vote, if these are things that you believe in, that you think you have a right to exercise, then everybody has that right. And the duty of the government is to make sure that everybody

gets to exercise their rights equally. That is the fundamental duty of the government. As soon as the government takes any different stance than that, then what the government is doing is saying, well, some people have the privilege to vote, and other people don't. And we'll decide who the privileged are. And that's North Korea.

And that's fucking Vladimir Putin's world. It's no different. It's just no different. And I want to say, too, I know it's undocumented. I am mimicking their talking points when I say illegal immigrant. So you don't need to correct my language. I know it's undocumented. And when I talk about those people, I call them undocumented.

I don't use that language. But I don't use that language. But I recognize that when I'm talking about when I'm representing their point, I should use the language that they're using. And that is the language that they're using. And that language is just blatantly false. because illegal doesn't make any sense in that sense. It doesn't make any sense in that context.

But they use it very specifically because it's powerful language that they very specifically use to try to diminish those people in any way that they can. It's very true. And, you know, another way that I want to point out, another way that this is oftentimes by disingenuous piece of shit liars being phrased is what they'll say is something like, well, how would you, if you don't want to have proof of citizenship at the polls,

then how would you prevent, illegal aliens from voting. Massive voter fraud. So they'll build in a question that then forces you to try to come up with an answer when the right thing to do is to reject the premise of the question, right? Because the premise of the question is that there are a lot of undocumented people already voting and therefore we need a solution to it. But they'll use rhetorical tricks.

Yeah, it's great point. Where they're like, well, if you don't like this solution, what's your solution? It's like, there's not a problem. It's a statistically insignificant, non-issue thing you've been lied to about. If you believe that crime is this big, oh my God, what are we going to do? You're lying. You've been lied to. Crime is way down. I was just reading something the other day about how an enormous amount of prisons in America

are like emptying out. We just are sending massively less people to prison. As the people we put in during the height of the war on drugs, either pass away or let out or otherwise age out of that penal system, the number of people incarcerated in America is plummeting. It's absolutely plummeting. And it is making a lot of these people who operate for-profit prison systems panic and they're putting pressure on people to find ways to fill those prisons back up. No surprise then that that powerful and influential financial lobby is then saying, hey, here's another group of people that might be good because otherwise I'm going to lose

these contracts. Why build these new holding centers if you were just going to deport those people? Right. Why build giant holding centers all across the country if those people were just going to get deported anyway? The reason is you want to keep those people.

You want to house those people in a place. That's what you want to do. And then you want to siphon government money to take care of them. Exactly. Badly. Yeah. I order you to be quiet. Order how do you think he is? I'm your king. Well, I didn't vote for you. You don't vote.

for kings. Well, how'd you become king then? The lady of the lake. Her arm clad in the purest shimmering Seymite held a loft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I'm your king. Listen, strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some fire. classical aquatic ceremony. Be quiet. It's stories from the New Republic.

FCC attempt to kill Stephen Colbert interview completely backfires. This is so good. Yeah. This is so good. Did you watch the interview? I didn't watch the interview. I watched the whole interview. There's nothing in that interview that you could look at and think,

I need to get this off of regular television. And the only reason they did this is because they're trying to enforce this regulation where they're saying there needs to be equal time between Republican and Democratic. crack left and right on different stations. But talk shows have been able to skirt that for a long time. I would only the view got in trouble for having, I don't know, is it Telerico or Telerico? I'm not sure. I think it's Telerico.

Is it Telerico? But yeah, you know, this guy is a, he's a rising star. The things he had to say on here were, I guess, similar things he had on the view, and the view got in trouble. So the view evidently had an issue. And so CBS said, no, we're not going to. to publish it. You could put it, and I think they said you could put it on your YouTube page. And so that's what Colbert did. I watched the whole thing. And he has all the same

points in every single interview. So it's not like this is a brand new thing. And to be honest, it's the first time I ever watched an interview like this where I kind of wanted to turn it off because of the applause. Every few seconds, he's saying something and people are applauding. And I'm thinking, Jesus, can I just hear what this guy has to say instead of every 20 seconds, somebody's cheering when he says something. But his message is pretty simple. It's, you know, we should make sure that there's a separation of church and state because in his mind, you know, God is the biggest thing and we shouldn't try to fit God into a party. It's, you know, the party should have to figure out what values God has or whatever.

You know, like this is a whole thing, right? He's a religious guy. You know what I mean? Like, this guy is a religious guy. Do I think he's the best choice for that office? I don't know enough about both his and Jasmine Crockett's policies to know which one is the one. A lot of people are now talking about. corporate money and how much money is going into different people.

And a lot of people automatically presume that if you get any corporate money, you're 100% controlled by those corporate entities, which I don't think is necessarily true. But I also think, like, I don't want to risk that at a certain point. Sure. There is some truth to that, too. But one of the things that I recognize when I see this guy, one of the things I think he doesn't recognize at all,

is that he doesn't recognize that churches hurt people. He's one of these people that I think is, you know, a very religious guy who doesn't realize that churches have an issue or religion hurts people in a lot of ways. He doesn't, it's something that washes over him. So he's constantly talking about religion as if it's like an utmost good, which I think is bad for everybody. But his policies seem fine. He seems like the kind of guy who's like, hey, there's definitely a class war rather than a, you know, an ideological, this back and forth, you know, culture war stuff that everybody's talking about. He's like, it's really about a class war.

upper class versus lower class kind of thing. So good message, I think, all around. But really nothing, Tom, there was so nothing in this that was like, oh my God, got to stop the presses. It was so milk toast. Yeah, like what's the thing that is interesting to me about the whole thing. And that's funny because I listen to a podcast about this. I read this article. I read another article, but it didn't even occur to me to go watch the interview.

Because to me, the interesting thing about this is the media is now signaling that they are afraid and they are cowtowing and they are afraid of Brandon Carr using the power of the FCC which they tried to do with Jimmy Kimmel and they said hey shots fired and CBS is like all right we hear you and so we're going to put the leash on these voices we are not going to have these voices on the equal time rule is a fucking ye oldie style rule I know it's from the 80s but like it's never been enforced ever for late night talk shows for daytime talk. not what it's for. It's for news. So the FCC potentially leveling this against anything that's like

not directly a news program signals their intention to hurt these organizations like CBS, etc. And they've made that very, very clear. They made that clear with 60 minutes and the way they sued the shit out of them. They made it clear with Jimmy Kimmel. This is an attempt to censor speech from the media. But what like they can't do, And what I love is that they try to do this to Colbert, who's fucking quitting anyway. He's out.

Like his show is on the way out. Sure. He basically was like, all right, well, they said I can't say anything. They said I can't do it. I'm going to tell you about it anyway. And then I'm going to put it on YouTube and more people watched it on YouTube than watched the Colbert show. Sure.

So all this did, all that pressure campaign did was create an inflection point to actually move more people to watch the thing. It's like, was there ever a period in your life where you're like, banned books, put those on my reading list? Yeah, man, for sure. Thanks for this, dumbass. Yeah. I'm scared, Kate. Oh, stop booing. There's nothing wrong with it.

There are dozens of us. Dozens! Seasel, all I care about this week is this video. This is from Yahoo Entertainment. Watch Kid Rock and RFK Jr. take off their shirts in new workout video. Okay, so trigger warning. you're going to see both RFK and Kid Rock without shirts on. But we're going to watch this video with you guys.

We'll pause it as we work our way through. I'm going to try to describe what's happening on the screen for people who are just listening. So we're going to start watching it. I am going to mute it because it's just a kid rock song and no one needs to do that. So here we go. So this starts out.

They're in a very, very tall room. An unbelievably tall room, in fact, with a giant bear behind them. There's a bear. A giant taxidermied grizzly. I see Jeremy Grizzly, and then there's RFK who looks like a

California raisin, next to Kid Rock, who looks like a white-bellied alligator. I do want to ask before the video starts. I don't understand why RFK Jr. always looks like he got out of a lobster boil. He really does. He's so

red. He's so red. He's so red. It's like, it's insane how red his, just All of his skin is so red. Also, look at the shells behind them. They kind of look like they're working out in like a Levi's store or something. Thank you. Where are they?

I don't know where they're at. Where are they? Here they are. They're in some log cabin somewhere. Do you have any time to each other? If you ever want to buy me a gift, I'll take a taxidermied bear. Taxidermid bear. I would love a taxid.

It's so big. You'd need like a whole crew to move it in. I'm okay with that. Is that the bear he put on the bike? Here we go. It's an image of them There's a shark There's a shark and a jet

And it just popped out of nowhere In front of an American flag And it says Rockout work Rock out work Here we go What is Rock out workout? Oh it's a rock out workout

And there's a fucking eagle A superimposed eagle He is the ceilings in this place Are so intensely tall It's like a casino It's so big Kid Rock has taken his shirt off And obviously has skipped a lot of leg days

He has skipped a lot of leg days. They're eating something, look like a mayonnaise. They're in a car. Holding an American flag. Then flames just attack the camera. Now they're working out. And when they're working out,

they're on machines. So he's doing a little bit of cable poles. Got some cable poles going on. They're doing sit-ups working out. They both do have shirts on at this point. Yeah, they took their shirts off just to put them back on. Although while working out, RFK still has like 501.

on. Yeah, look, this is like, all I care about is that he is wearing regular Levi's jeans. You can tell their Levi's. You can actually see the branding on the back. He's wearing regular Levi's jeans for his workout. And it's not even like the newer jeans that are like kind of stretchy and comfortable. My whole life, I grew up wearing essentially burlap sacks on my leg. Thank you.

Yes. But they're not just burlap sacks. They're like burlap sacks that are sewn to like 50 other burlap sacks to get the thickness right. And then you've got to walk around and you feel like you're in. You seriously feel like if you starch these right, these could function as leg armor. For 100%. I think if I remember right, like jeans, the genesis of them was essentially that.

It was like, here's some pants you can't ruin. You're a minor in like the 49er times, you know? I will tell you a quick funny story. Like back when I was doing CrossFit, I would drive to my trainer's house and like I would work out in her garage. And so I drove over there one time And as I got out of my car I realized I had forgotten to bring my gym back And I was wearing jeans and like a work shirt

And that's what I had been wearing that day And I was like well fuck I'm like 40 minutes away from where I live I got I'm gonna miss the whole window That I have to work out I'm just and I walked in and she's like What are you gonna wear? I'm like well I'll just I'll do this in jeans

And I couldn't get through the warm up They just like were that they're not stretchy You can't squat you can't move in them so finally I was like, I'm just working out in my underwear. And I just stripped down on my underwear and I'm like, you're just dealing with this? That's how this works. She's a long, longstanding friend of mine. We thought it was funny.

It was not being, this is a very good friend of mine for like years and years. So please don't write me an email about how I abused this lady by showing my underwear. But like, yeah, it kind of did. But still, she was fine with it. She was fine. But it was definitely abuse. It was abuse. Yes.

But like it's impossible. Working out in jeans is that is, that is pathological. logically insane. It really is. And he's, and the worst part is that right now he's doing reverse leg curls in the jeans. It's not like he's not working out the muscles in the jeans. He's doing leg curls. Now he takes his shirt off and he's on a, he's on one of those assault bikes. And then Kid Rock's doing. They're in a sauna. Have you ever worked out inside a sauna? Never. Never. So I'm an idiot. I have worked out inside a sauna. Me and my old trainer, we would go to the lifetime fitness sometimes. and she'd be like, you want to work out in the sauna?

And I'd be like, yeah, I guess. Let's do it. It's horrible. It's horrible. There's no reason to do it. He flips off the camera. Okay, so now here's... Okay.

This is all I care about CISO. If you're watching this, you're watching what is a giant cold soaking tub. Yeah. A giant cold soaking tub. And RFK just climbed in. These guys jeans on. There's jeans on. I'm going to go.

swimming in my jeans. What the fuck? You know what I think? Have you ever watched Arrested Development? Oh, the first season, I think, and then he stopped. Is he a never-nude? I don't know what that is. So from Arrested Development, like David Cross's character is a never-nude. He wears jeans shorts,

even in the shower. He always had never-nude. He can't be nude. I watch this guy and I'm like, are you a fucking never-nude? What is happening right now? It really is. Like, he in jeans. And he submerges himself into the cold plunge and now he's in the cold plunge and then he gets out of his like giant he's got a

pole table it's obviously like his rec room he's walking across the ground that's not the same pair of jeans because they're darker or they're wet those are your two options he's in wet jeans walking across his room what why not just wear sandpaper right on your balls oh it looks like it's so unpleasant where's kid he says and kid rock is in a hot tub in proper attire. Okay. Flexes. As soon as they go to...

They're gonna play pickleball. As soon as they go to Kid Rock, flexing. There's fucking hard air quotes, by the way, around flexing for Kid Rock, right? He's just a scrawny dude.

That's all he is. But anyway, like this looks like they're at the fucking Playboy Mansion. It really does. It really... It seriously looks like

this is for play. Yeah, man. This has got weird grotto feel vibes. This definitely feels like we're playing to see who's top tonight. A, 100%. If you change this from a kid rock song and put like a little like,

like there's an ending to this movie that is short and predictable. So anyway, they're facing off in pickleball and they're, I mean, God, they're tearing it up out here. Look at them go, Tom. There's also like, they don't even look at they're moving. It's like, I've seen people move farther when they play ping pong. Also, like, they're trying to toughen up and like masculineize or hyper-masculize pickleball. by adding in lightning effects to pickleball.

Look, I'm not shitting on pickleball, but like, what is like lightning, kid rock claw, big man power trucks, pickleball. What? And then I can't connect these dots, man. My favorite part is how little they're moving, too. Yeah.

And evidently, Kid Rock 1. And then they're into Cyboris. And then they're back in the Sybress, man. And it's like a hot tub and RFK just jumped in with his jeans on again. What? He's back in his jeans. get that kid out of the pool.

He's in his jeans. Now they're drinking whole milk. In a hot tub. Dude, who drinks? Okay, first off. I don't believe Kid Rock likes that because he didn't blow up regular vitamin D milk with a shotgun. So if he didn't blow up the competitor with a shotgun, I can't believe. I can't believe you actually like this stuff.

But they're gagging on milk now. And then Kid Rock is laughing. And then that's the end of it. Make America healthy again. There you go. Sure. They also had a video on the Super Bowl, and it's Mike Tyson, and Mike Tyson's like,

when I was fat, I want to kill myself. I hate being fat. I was so ugly and gross. And now disgusting and I was fat, and I hate myself. I'm going to throw myself off the bridge, man. And then after it's over, he's like, and then I lost weight and I feel so much better out.

And then they're like, make a micro-halt again. I'm like, shut the fuck up. That was a commercial from the government. I know. And he's like, I want to kill myself because I'm fat. He's a fucking message from a voice. from a fucking rapist to the rest of us? What on earth is happening right now?

See, when I heard that fucking Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson, a rapist is on fucking government being like, it's better to be a rapist that's like, not a fat rapist or whatever. And you're like, this is the worst, dumbest America. This is it. I cannot understand who the audience.

is because I won't allow myself to understand who the audience is. Anybody who sees this and isn't like, who watches this and it's like, fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. I want fucking amazing. Our fucking guy is out there in his jeans and his fucking hot tub drinking fucking milk with some washed up fucking hillbilly.

If like the only person who watches this and is like, yes. It's like if truck nuts was a real person. Yeah, for sure. That's it. For sure. Yeah, absolutely. Like the living embodiment of just the Calvin decal pissing on something. And the thing is, is like, look at where this guy lives.

Like, look at the things that this person has access to. Because that's not anybody, that's not a fucking local gym that they're at. No. That's somebody's fucking house there. Right. It's either kids or, but it's, yeah. I think it's probably, it's almost certainly R of K's house. It's got to be R of K's house.

Because Kid Rock clearly doesn't work out. So, like, yeah, it's probably his gym. Yeah. Like, it's probably our kids gym. It's not like a small gym. Right. It's a big gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think, I think that's his house. Yeah, it's almost like the Kennedys have a lot of resources. I'm just like you. So what we need is. Come to my grotto. We need a guy who's so unbelievably wealthy that like every room has its own poseable bear. Like, what do we need that guy for? God.

You'll never recognize. There's a smile upon our face. We're changing all our dirty sheets and are cleaning up the place. Yep, since we got a lawyer and the public relations man, we're your friendly liberal neighborhood Ku Klux Klan. Yes, we're your friendly liberal neighborhood Ku Klux Klan. Ever since we got that lawyer and that public relations man, first we didn't shoot one reporter, but he was just obscene,

and you can't call us no filthy names. What's his Anglo-Saxon mean? So New York Times tracking the battle to reshape Congress for the midterm. So this is a state-by-state kind of where the congressional races are the most competitive. Put it on the big screen, but essentially we're going to lose. Like, you're just meant to lose. Like, it's not going to work out for us. If you look at the big map that's down here, the map is only on the main page.

But basically what it's showing you is it's saying, like, we're essentially, it's possible. So Republicans are either going to be up two or three votes in the actual changed maps. So in the actual changed maps, it's possible that the Republicans can get, will get two to three votes. But in the ones that aren't changed that are up for vote, even with getting three states to one, you're only up by four Democrats. So it's very possible that we could be up by two, but more possibly you're going to be up by three Republicans. Republican seats in the next election. Yeah. They have cheated their way into a tremendous structural advantage.

That's what this all is built on. They understand that like the way to win is not to do good things for the American people. The way to win is not to adjust their messaging, to appeal to people or to, you know, flaunt all the good things that they've done because they've not done any good things for us, right? What's the message? Like everything that was expensive is still fucking expensive.

Like, where's my, we made fun of the idea of affordability. We broke into your cities. We violated your civil rights. What's the message where everybody's excited right now? Gas isn't even cheaper. Like, I got, we've, it's been a year and change, and there's not been any of the things that the everyday person wants or needs. What's amazing is to watch the people in the administration just outwardly lie about it, right? Just to talk to people, and they'll just say, no, it's way better now.

It's 100% better. The Dow's over 50. Dow's over 50,000. And you're like, well, I don't care. The S&P is smashing records. Right. Oh, awesome. Like, what is it?

I don't understand how they don't understand that that message literally doesn't mean anything to most people. Most people don't have significant money invested. They don't have access to ready capital. It helps them pay for college and groceries and housing and electrical bills. You know, like across the country, like we're working. eminent domain is literally taking up people's property so we can build data centers so we can suck up electricity and drive energy prices for locals through the fucking roof. In some places,

they're doubling and tripling people's energy costs to build these data centers at the same time that they've taken the land through eminent domain for those data centers to lease it back or give it to private companies. And we're just like, yeah, it's awesome. Everything's chill. It's so cool. But anyway, the Dow's over 15. thousand. How does that pay my electrical bill? We have been for a very long time in our country paying attention to the Dow and to the business growth aspect of America thinking that it's going to trickle down because we were lied to for a long time. Yeah. It's just a lie that says that if there's abundance at the top that some crumbs will fall to the people below and the people

below will be happy with those crumbs, the problem is is that the crumbs are getting fewer and fewer and fewer. There's less crumbs out there for everyone. People are starting to experience severe hardship more so than they have in previous years. It's starting to get worse and worse and worse. We're experiencing some real bad economic downturns. Nobody's ever once turned to look and say, we need to change how wages are created in this country. Yeah. That's not a thing that anybody's ever done most of the time. I mean, once in a while, you'll get a politician, he'll be like, we need to raise the minimum wage. But how often does that happen? It's pretty rare. I mean, most people stay away from it. They don't talk about it. But they don't ever talk about minimum wage.

They don't talk about maximum wage. That should absolutely. be a thing. Maximum way should 100% be a thing. But we have a system that keeps on rewarding companies, keeps on rewarding companies for clear-cutting all their, every kind of human personnel that they can to gain profits. We do this constantly.

And you see the fruits of it when it's completely unregulated. You see what happens. It's not going to get any better in the next three years. There's no way it's going to get better. Yeah, we don't have a group of people who have any interest in taking care of you. No. They have no interest in taking care of you.

Just this week, the CEO of Microsoft came out and said that within the next five years, AI could replace 80% of all white-collar jobs. That's 60% of all jobs in America are white-collar jobs. That would be 48% of all jobs in America in five years if you buy that math could be eliminated. And our plan to plan for a level of unemployment, which would be twice as bad as the Great Depression, if that were to occur, our plan to plan for that is literally nothing.

I will say this. If it does eliminate all those white-collar jobs, something will happen. There will be some change. And it's because the white collar has a lot more say than any other collar in the United States. The white collar will change everything. If white-collar jobs actually do come under threat in major ways,

you're going to see something will have to change because there's no way they're going to be like, well, that's fine. Yeah, well, like what nobody seems to be actively contending with is that if there are these massive job losses, then like these companies that have saved money on this end of it have lost all of the consumers. So it's a cycle that is vicious. It's a terrible cycle. Yeah. Absolutely right.

And I guess all I wanted to say is like, we're just doing no planning for any for any of these problems. We're not doing any planning. All the right seems interested in doing is building structural cheats so they can continue. to win elections. That's it. Yeah. The countries we know it might be crumbling underneath our feet, but I'm finally starting to see results in the gym. This story is from The Skeptic, written by, let me just check this byline, our friend Michael Marshall, what the Epstein files tells us about conspiracy theories and about skeptics. I had an opportunity to look through this. I actually want to say I promoted a piece of misinformation on our show. You did. What was it?

So a couple weeks ago, I said there was an email from Elon Musk to Epstein that went to Jolene Maxwell that he responded to. Never existed. Oh, I did see that in this article. Never existed. I forgot we talked about that. Never existed. So I mentioned it on the show that there was a fake message.

And I didn't realize it was fake at the time, but it was everywhere. Like, it was literally everywhere. And I didn't take the second that you need to do to fact check to make sure it's a real thing. So what you have is you have me seeing something online and it's ubiquitous and I think oh well because of its ubiquity that gives it a validity that it doesn't

have and it wasn't real. It's not a real thing that actually happened and in the email that's fake Elon reaches out and says hey it's come to the island and then they refuse him. They say we're done with the parties for a while and everybody was posting this everywhere and someone made it. It's a fake thing

that someone made up and then they didn't bother or it was it was taken out of context to remove the idea that it was satire. So now it's a thing that people think is real. And I was caught in by it. I have stopped doing that. I stopped doing it like before I found out that I was wrong about it very specifically because there's been so much that has been released

that it's so hard to know what's true and what's not. And we're seeing actors on our side and other sides that are creating stuff that you would think is real or that sounds real. and it is being produced as if it is real. It's not real. It's not something that's actually happening. There's a quote that's going around

where Pam Bondi has supposedly said, we can't prosecute them all because if we do the whole system would collapse. I don't know if you've seen this. No, I know. It's going around everywhere. It's on memes all over the place. She never said it.

It's not a real thing. Someone made it up. So we've got to be real careful in this time, and I'm guilty of it. Like, I'll admit, I'm guilty of it. I fell into the trap of, oh, that was everywhere. That's got to be real. No, take the time that you need to figure this out.

Yeah, I think that's good. We've talked about this before. The massive problem with the Epstein files is there are so many motivated players. Yeah. To use the 3 million page, just enormous explosion of documents to muddy the water any way they can to further their narrative or just to troll. You know, there's all kinds of bad actors out there. Don't forget that one of the kinds of bad actors are the people who are not ideologically motivated, they just like lying. They just think it's fun to create bullshit and put bullshit out into the environment.

And because it's virtually impossible to filter out what you see or don't see, if you're in these spaces, you're just going to see it. You're just going to see it. And like, you have to do a lot of work to, you can't unsee it. please disregard is not a thing, right? So it's real difficult. Anytime you've got a data dump that's three million pages, you essentially have infinite possibilities for bad actors to manipulate you. You know what's funny is our audience is normally really good about this stuff. And if we say something false, they will reach out to us. I didn't see a single thing that said I was mistaken. Yeah, it's true. I didn't see a single thing. I didn't see a email or anything. I didn't see a message

that came in that said, hey, by the way, you're mistaken. Now, I might have missed it because there's, we get a lot of messages. So sometimes I miss it. So it's possible. If you send something in, I missed it. But I didn't get a correction. I normally do get corrected

when I mess things up like that. And I think the thing is is that this is so hard to filter that people are going to mess up on this sort of thing. And the other thing you've got to pay attention to too, too is in the next, I think it's on Tuesday,

this upcoming week, for the wide audience, we're going to release a show we just recorded for the No Rogan experience. It's a two-parter on the Epstein. files. Because Joe Rogan just got this massive dump and then he's had a bunch of people on and he's had conversations with him. And so he's had like a whole week of conversations. And so what we did was went through and cut out all the Epstein parts and we're going to cover what he covers for that week

and then go back in his back catalog and find a bunch of stuff. It's actually a lot of work. We put in a ton of work into the show to find where he's talked about it in the past, how he talks about it now, that sort of thing. And Joe is just literally regurgitating PizzaGate. So Joe at the beginning of the week starts talking about little things and we point out all the bad stuff that he does. But then, and the second part of that episode is going to be a two-parter.

And the second part of that episode, he turns the corner with a crazy person who's saying that there's demons out there and they're eating, they're eating babies. And then they're talking about a bunch of sulfuric acid

that was ordered, and they're making up a bunch of stories around that and how, you know, so they're rumor-mongering. But one thing you got to pay attention to with PizzaGate, and I say this on the show is

the good thing for all the liars out there is there's already a bunch of Pizza-Gate stuff. So there's a bunch of stuff that happened with PizzaGate. It's old conspiracy, but you can easily repurpose all that stuff now for people who haven't actually seen it or forgot about it. So now what we're going to be dealing with is not only all this stuff that comes out of here, but they're going to go out of their way to find things that match PizzaGate in the new in these files. And they're going to say, see, they were talking about pizza. See, they were talking about this.

Look at these guys. And they're going to use that PizzaGate stuff as like, we were right all along. And I also have a giant trot of information I can now disseminate that was all false information from before. That'll get you to, now I've got to, you got to look at. You got to go look at those WikiLeaks emails to figure out, did Podesta say this? Right. Did Clinton say this? Now I've got to look at the other emails. And it's just, it's just a massive disinformation campaign can be easily created. And it's because of how these things were released and the fuckery around all that. Yeah. I think here, here's my, here's my real.

suggestion. Don't read anything about the Epstein files that doesn't come from a vetted news source. It's got to come from a source. You've got all of the incentives are lined up for places like the New York Times, etc. And I only mention them because I know they built

a custom tool, but their news outlets have every incentive to comb carefully through these documents and find out juicy details that they can report and get people interested in. They are not like, oh, stayed and steady. And so guy like they want juicy details if they can get a great big whopping ass headline out of something

out of the three million documents if it's true they're going to do it a hundred percent they're going to do it all the incentives line up you don't have to like get your information from fucking joe x on fucking twitter that's nonsense don't do that all the good information is going to come from news sources because that's where the incentives line up all the incentives for the not news sources are lined up to lie to you well and and you can also just check these things yourself That's the other thing too is if you're curious and you think

oh is that in there they have search functions you can search and can check so try to find it on there first before you make a stupid statement like I did right

like I granted we didn't cover it on the show as if it was an offhanded it was an offhanded comment but like it was wrong it's false I don't want to send people false information

I do my best not to give people false information and it's embarrassing when I mentioned stuff like that I'm embarrassed by it yeah but that's the problem of the glut

of the media environment we're in. It's just so vast. And it reminds me every time to do better. It's like, you've got to do better. You've got to be better than that. And I'll sometimes couch that with like, oh, I don't know if this is true, but even that stuff isn't as good as I want to be. I want to be better than that. And so it's tough because there is forces out there that want to put, they want to muddy the water for their side or they want to just, like you say, just be assholes. All right. So that's going to wrap it up for the show this week. we'll be back with a patron show on Thursday and we'll be back with a regular show on Monday.

We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized,

stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late-night info, docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques and synagogues,

temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. thrust your hands bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this.

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and threads, all under the handle at DissinencePod. This show is Can Credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creator accountability network.org.